Public School Teachers for School Choice?

Jennifer Garrett, a researcher with the Heritage Foundation, recently wrote an amusing look at the state of the school choice debate in California (originally written for Scripps Howard, the op-ed was republished at CapitalismMagazine.Com. It seems a state legislator decided to try to hold public school teachers to their anti-choice rhetoric and, predictably, the teachers had a fit.

Garrett writes about the exploits of Republican state senator Ray Haynes, who recently introduced a bill that would have required teachers in public schools to send their children to public schools. That proposal did not go over very well. In fact the anti-choice California Teachers Association said, through spokesman mike Myslinksi, that “People have the right to put their children in [private schools.]”

Of course many of them already do. According to Garrett, a study by the CTA itself recently showed that one-third of teachers in California’s public school system send their children to private schools.

This is the same union, however, that Garrett notes successfully led the fight against California’s Proposition 38 which would have given parents vouchers to send their children to public schools. When a public school teacher sends his or her children to a private school that’s a choice; when a poor parent in a failing inner city school district wants to do the same thing, that’s called undermining the public school system.